Sunday, August 24, 2014

Eckhart, on sensation

But you might say, 'Alas, sir, I feel so bare and cold and lazy that I dare not face our Lord !' I reply, All the more need for you to go to your God, for by Him you will be enflamed and set afire, and in Him you will be sanctified and joined and made one with Him, for you will find such grace in the sacrament, and nowhere else so truly, that your bodily powers are there united and collected by the precious power of the physical presence of our Lord's body, so that all a man's scattered senses and his mind are here concentrated and unified, and those which especially were too much inclined downward will be lifted up and duly offered to God.

And by the indwelling God they will be so inwardly trained and weaned of the bodily hindrances of temporal things and limbered up toward divine things, and so, strengthened by God's body, your body will be renewed.

For we should be turned into Him and become fully united with Him, so that His own becomes ours, and ours all becomes His: our heart and His one heart and our body and His one body. Thus our senses and our will, intention, our powers and our limbs are borne into Him so that we sense and become aware of Him in all the powers of body and soul.

Only a proper and practical understanding of the organic sense of Being and the inward flow of the Divine Presence will reveal how precise Eckhart's words are here.

He is describing, in a few brief paragraphs, everything Jeanne de Salzmann attempted to transmit in her own notes; and the unity he speaks of is directly related to Gurdjieff's explanation that sensation is the source of one's sense of individuality. We cannot mistake, here, the gathering of attention within the body and within Being; and its uplifting effect upon the soul.

It's impossible to divorce any of this understanding from Swedenborg's explanations regarding the inward flow of the Divine; there can be only one understanding on these issues, even though words always come to it from so many different directions. The inward sense of God's Presence is an objective quality; and no matter how it is described it is always sensed in exactly the same way, just as each man who reaches for an object in the darkness will sense that object through touch in exactly the same way. This is why sensation (and the subtle yet pervasive sense of touch itself, which is a part of sensation) is such an important factor in the understanding of God's Presence; unlike thought, which can turn and twist in many ways, sensation is a straight thing which under any ordinary circumstances does not deviate.

This is also why pain and pleasure can be such accurate teachers; a man or woman can think anything he or she likes, and recast it in a thousand different lights, but we all feel pain the same way.

And again, in a different manner, sensation always begins in silence; for silence is its nature, and silence is by its nature the most feminine and receptive of qualities.

Things that are sensed, in other words, carry a truth the mind cannot interfere with; and perhaps this is why God comes to us so certainly, first, within sensation; whereas in our beliefs and in our minds, there is no such quiet, and hence no unerring chance of experiencing His Presence.

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Recommendations and current reading list

Lee's current reading list (all recommended)

The Iceberg- Marion Coutts. This extraordinary book deserves to be read by every individual engaged in an inner search. The questions it raises about life, death, and relationship are framed by the authors responsibilities to her very young child and her dying husband. This is a book about real work in life, not esoteric theory.

Far From The Tree: Andrew Solomon. Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. Highly recommended.

Inner Yoga, Sri Anirvan—This extraordinary book is essential reading for any serious student of Gurdjieff or Yoga practice. Written at a level of both practical and philosophical discourse well above other contemporary work, Anirvan investigates the deep roots of Yoga practice, theory, and philosophy in a deeply sensitive series of insights. Of particular interest is the extraordinary and challenging piece on Buddhi and Buddhiyoga, which examines the questions of practice, life, and death with an acuity rarely encountered in other work of this nature.

Divine Love and Wisdom, Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg gives us a detailed report on Reality as received from higher sources, reflecting many Truths one would be wise to study carefully. Readers will be astounded by the extraordinary degree of correlation between Swedenborg and Ibn 'Arabi. Many fundamental principles introduced by Gurdjieff are also expounded on in fascinating detail by Swedenborg. All of Swedenborg's works are well worth reading.

The Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom, Ibn 'Arabi. Another real gem, this book ought to be read by every seeker on the spiritual path. If you can only find the time to read one book by Ibn 'Arabi, this ought to be the one. By turns lighthearted, serious, insightful, and ingenius, al 'Arabi introduces us to our inner government character by character, explains their relationships, and indicates how to bring them into a state of harmonious cooperation. Written with love, the book deftly manages to avoid being didactic, delivering instead a sensitive, poetic, and even romantic look at how to organize our inner Being.

The Bezels of Wisdom—Ibn al 'Arabi. A compendium of observations about the nature of "The Reality"—what al 'Arabi calls God— from a 13th century Sufi master. This towering work easily holds its own against—and is worthy of comparison to—13th century masterpieces from other major religious traditions such as Dogen's Shobogenzo and Meister Eckhart's sermons.